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Allies Not Likely to Push Mugabe to Change

President Robert G. Mugabe of Zimbabwe and his wife, Grace, in Lusaka, Zambia, for a meeting of African leaders on Thursday.Credit
Alexander Joe/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

JOHANNESBURG, Aug. 16 — Southern Africa’s political leaders gathered Thursday in Lusaka, Zambia, to discuss Zimbabwe’s political and economic collapse, but it appeared unlikely that they would press its president, Robert G. Mugabe, to change any of the policies that critics said had brought his nation to ruin.

To the contrary, Mr. Mugabe arrived at the meeting to a fusillade of cheers and applause from attendees that, news agencies reported, overwhelmed the polite welcomes for other heads of state.

The meeting, of the Southern African Development Community, a 14-nation bloc devoted to economic and political cooperation, is the group’s second this year to be dominated by Zimbabwe’s long-running crisis. The same leaders gathered in private with Mr. Mugabe in March, and, diplomats said at the time, indicated that they had warned him to restore political and economic freedoms or face isolation.

Mr. Mugabe was unrepentant then, and at Thursday’s session the comments of leaders of neighboring states about Zimbabwe’s descent were notably bland.

Zambia’s president, Levy Mwanawasa, who compared Zimbabwe to “a sinking Titanic” at the meeting in March, urged Mr. Mugabe in an opening speech to protect what he called Zimbabwe’s hard-won independence from colonial rule 27 years ago.

The Mozambican executive secretary of the regional group, Tomaz A. Salomao, suggested that economic sanctions imposed by Western nations were partly responsible for Zimbabwe’s disintegration.

The sanctions largely freeze the foreign assets of top Zimbabwean officials, bar them from traveling to Western states and prohibit military sales. Otherwise, Europe and the United States remain among Zimbabwe’s top trading partners.

Western governments were hopeful early this year that Zimbabwe’s neighbors would press Mr. Mugabe to end a crisis that has sent refugees flooding across their borders. Experts say the situation poses an increasing threat to regional security.

Most of that hope has now diminished, said John Prendergast, a former Clinton administration specialist on Africa. He said African leaders faced “a structural obstacle” to addressing Zimbabwe’s problems: their deference to Mr. Mugabe’s status as a hero of the region’s liberation struggles in decades past.

“No matter what happens inside that country as the meltdown continues to intensify, that unshakeable deference has not been altered,” he said. “We’ve seen time and time again that they simply have not been able to rise to the occasion.”

In March, the regional leaders asked President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa to mediate a solution to Zimbabwe’s political crisis that would pave the way toward genuinely free presidential elections next March. Mr. Mbeki is to report privately to the leaders on his mission at the Lusaka meeting, but there is little evidence of progress.

Zimbabwean officials said before the meeting that they saw no reason to cooperate with their political opponents in the Movement for Democratic Change, a small and deeply divided group of democracy advocates.

Critics charge that Zimbabwe’s seven-year decline is a result of increasingly repressive policies imposed by Mr. Mugabe’s government that have driven away foreign investment and stoked hyperinflation, now exceeding 10,000 percent a year, local economists say.

But on Thursday, Mr. Mugabe’s justice minister, Patrick Chinamasa, told journalists at the Lusaka meeting that Zimbabwe’s problems had been overblown by the world’s news media and that the political changes demanded by pro-democracy groups were unnecessary.

“You have a situation where issues are being portrayed, exaggerated, to portray Zimbabwe as a country that has become ungovernable,” news agencies quoted him as saying. “Nothing is further from the truth.”

But Zimbabwe’s plight has worsened since June, when the government ordered all businesses to roll back prices, effectively declaring inflation illegal. Since then, factories have curtailed production, workers have been laid off and store shelves have emptied of basic goods.

In Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second-largest city, a security guard and a child were reported by news agencies to have been killed Thursday after a line of shoppers awaiting a rare delivery of sugar mobbed a storefront, toppling a brick wall on top of them.

A version of this article appears in print on , on page A12 of the New York edition with the headline: Allies Not Likely to Push Mugabe to Change. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe